The Social

CNET News' Caroline McCarthy gets to test out a Taser T3 device, but much to her chagrin, she wasn't allowed to shoot it at a live human.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

DUBLIN, Calif.--Don't tase me, bro. Really.

CNET News took a trip to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office Regional Training Center on Friday to have a look at some of the newest equipment from Taser, which was among the companies showing off weaponry at the UrbanShield 2009 training event. The electric-shock gadgets are controversial and have drummed up some bad press over the years for causing the occasional serious injury or even fatality. But the company has maintained its insistence that they are significantly safer than the alternative (i.e. guns).

We didn't get to tase anybody. But we did get to see the Shockwave, a big Taser device that can incapacitate five or six people at a time, which company representatives told us is designed for crowd-control situations and can be triggered remotely via a 100-foot firing wire.

There are also two recently released handheld Tasers: the X3, which unlike its single-shot predecessors can fire off a total of three shots at once; and the XREP, a Taser projectile that's fired out of a modified 12-gauge shotgun (the modifications ensure that regular cartridges can't be used instead). Both devices are bright yellow, which representatives told us means they're easily identified as non-lethal weapons.

You can't go to your local sporting goods store and buy these Tasers--unlike the smaller, consumer-grade C2 devices, the X3 and XREP lines are only sold to police, military, and sometimes animal-control professionals. Taser International's vice president of training, Rick Guilbault, told us that a Taser was once used to pry off a rogue python that had wrapped itself around a woman's arm and wouldn't let go.

Another time, a Taser was successfully used to safely deter an out-of-control alligator in Florida. "But then they tried it in Australia on those big salt-water crocodiles," Guilbault related, "and that didn't work. It just made them mad."

Photos: The newest in Taser tech

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaks with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit about features we can expect from the social-networking site.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Two of the biggest rumors about big, upcoming Facebook products--an ad network and a payment transaction platform--won't be making a big splash anytime soon, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a talk on Wednesday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit.

"We're asked it all the time," Sandberg said on the question of whether Facebook would be launching an ad network for external Web sites using the Facebook Connect universal-login product. "We focus on building products for users and we think about the monetization later. And I'm not saying that in a cute way, because we are very focused on monetization."

Then there are the reports that Facebook will be launching a PayPal-like transaction system or large-scale virtual currency, a rumor that's been floating around literally for years. "There's a lot of speculation on payments, and (we) don't want to fuel the speculation," Sandberg said in her talk on Wednesday. She did say that Facebook processes payments internally for advertisers buying up inventory ("We needed people to be able to buy ads internationally," she explained) and that it's playing around with the "credits" system that it uses in its "gift shop" feature.

"We are doing some testing with a couple of developers to see if they can use credits in apps they have," Sandberg said. "That's all we're talking about right now. We're in a learning phase."

Some potential customers have hinted that Facebook may have already gotten too big to deploy such a product. When asked about the idea of a Facebook payment system, John Cahill, the CEO of teen virtual-world Meez, told CNET News earlier this week that he's skeptical about its potential.

"The bigger the social network, the harder it is for a currency," Cahill said. "I've spent some time in the payments space and the real-world currency space, and rolling out a payment system that can be used by millions of people is very, very difficult. If you get it wrong, you can destroy your community."

But Facebook is dipping one toe after another into the virtual-goods pool. Earlier on Wednesday, the New York Times broke the story that Facebook would be letting members gift songs to one another through a partnership with music service Lala. This would be the first concrete result of yet another longstanding rumor of a "Facebook music service."

Additionally, Facebook has partnered with a number of nonprofits for charity-focused virtual gifts.

SAN FRANCISCO--More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day, Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said in a talk Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit here.

Mike Schroepfer

Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month--1.2 million served per second on a "peak day," he said. Five billion calls to Facebook's application program interface (API) were made on Tuesday. It's huge: Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, was focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users it has today.

One of the big challenges is that Facebook's home page news feeds have to be able to process 50 million operations per second. "We took a piece of open source software, Memcache, customized it, and deployed it," Schroepfer said as he discussed how the company keeps its home pages streamlined. "We were able to scale Memcache to five times its original performance."

He talked a bit about the company's culture, too.

"Move fast, break stuff" is one of Facebook's engineering tenets, Schroepfer explained. "Sometimes we push bugs. Sometimes we push products that people don't like." Those missteps, he said, are necessary for constant innovation. Some poorly-received modifications to the home page, for example, are about to be phased out.

The company also believes in accomplishing a lot with small teams, Schroepfer said. That's something some Facebook users might not think is such a good thing: Earlier this month a downed database at Facebook temporarily disabled about 150,000 accounts, and many took well over a week to come back. The company's chief operating officer admitted later that its response had been "too slow."

Evan Williams (left) and John Battelle (right)

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect "a surprise" during the talk.

Turns out that "surprise" was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of '90s alterna-teen flick "Empire Records." (No, we don't have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams didn't really say a whole lot else about where Twitter's going, beyond what the world already knows: it's been growing fast. It turned down a buyout offer from Facebook. It just raised a ton of money. It still hasn't disclosed a long-term revenue model.

Evan Williams

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

"It's not like we're spending our days looking in the couch cushions for the elusive revenue model, but obviously we've done a lot of thinking about it," Williams said, declining to comment on the potential of search deals with Google or Microsoft. "I can't tell you exactly what the model is, but it's pretty obvious to you that there may be some advertising that makes sense...there's a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today, there's a lot of brand marketers who use Twitter today, and it works. We think of Twitter (as) not a social network, it's an information network...a substantial part of that is commercial and theoretically monetizable information."

Williams, who previously founded Pyra Labs and sold its flagship Blogger product to Google, took over as CEO of Twitter from fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey last year. Dorsey, who remains Twitter chairman, is working on a new mobile commerce start-up called Square.

In his talk at Web 2.0 Summit, Williams mentioned new features like user-generated "lists," currently in beta, and said that they may end up replacing the site's current (and much-maligned) "suggested user" list altogether. ("It's gone on too long, and I desperately want to kill it or evolve it.") He also said that "some things we're launching" may counteract recent slowdowns in Twitter's U.S. Web-based traffic, which was growing exponentially not so long ago.

"We are seeing slowing of growth in some areas and accelerating growth in other areas. Twitter is very hard to measure, even for us," Williams said. "The biggest two areas that we're seeing growth is on mobile and internationally." Last week, the company inked new mobile deals in India and Japan; currently, its five biggest markets are the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia, which has been "growing like crazy lately."

So what does he think of the other players in the real-time Web? He's not sure what to make of Google Wave ("I sure as hell don't know what Google Wave is going to be. I haven't wrapped my head around it yet") but underscored that in Twitter's early days he wasn't sure what that would turn out to be either. And as for Facebook, he shrugged off speculation that the social-networking giant started aping Twitter when it was unable to actually buy it.

"I don't know how Facebook's feature prioritization works. I suspect that they came to a lot of the same conclusions we did," Williams said. "In the global sense, I'm pretty sure the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter, and fundamentally I think they're good at different things. Facebook is phenomenal at communications among people who know each other."

Facebook ultimately purchased a far smaller streaming-information start-up, FriendFeed, this summer.

"We had a few conversations with our friends in Palo Alto (Facebook) and ultimately I just didn't see a reason to sell if that opportunity would have presented itself because it's not the point," he continued regarding the failed acquisition. "The point is really to see what we can build. We believe very strongly in that at Twitter, and enabling the open exchange of information is a good thing for the world."

It's his usual schpiel. Aside from the Nirvana-era haircut, there wasn't a whole lot to tweet about here.

SAN FRANCISCO--Cable companies get a lot of criticism from the Silicon Valley set for being some of the ultimate 20th century corporate dinosaurs. Or, as Web 2.0 Summit conference organizer John Battelle put it, "a dead duck."

So the head of Comcast, a company that's taken loads of heat from tech experts--for imposing bandwidth caps, poor customer service, and an alleged failure to innovate on both broadband speeds and the convergence between television and the Web--was an interesting choice to kick off the summit event here on Tuesday. But Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spun his company to the audience as springing from the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit that the Bay Area prides itself on.

He spoke of how he took over the reins of the company from his father, who according to legend was able to make an early strategic acquisition thanks to the winnings from a Tupelo, Miss., poker game the night before. "Similar to probably almost everyone in this room, (he) wanted to work for himself, wanted to start his own business."

He previewed new features for the Comcast video hub Fancast, which it launched slightly under two years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show. The new beta of Fancast, which will launch by year's end, will make new on-demand content available online, much of it unavailable in outlets like iTunes--and integrated with DVR boxes--to Comcast cable subscribers who already pay for HBO. About two dozen content providers have signed on board, and as Roberts scrolled through the preview, he noted that there were about a thousand movies available.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

(Credit: Comcast)

Battelle, interviewing Roberts onstage, called it "video-on-demand on steroids."

The Associated Press, referencing a briefing this week with executives at Comcast's Philadelphia headquarters, helped fill in some of the details about the service, noting that it would include such popular cable shows as HBO's "Entourage" and AMC's "Mad Men" and for now is being called "On Demand Online."

The AP said Comcast subscribers can initially watch shows and movies only on their home computers after being verified by the cable system. Online viewing, at least in the beginning, will be restricted to those who get Internet service through Comcast, not through competitors like phone companies, the AP said.

Back at Web 2.0 Summit, Roberts also said that Comcast investments in broadband technology are, in part, what has facilitated the explosion in Web innovation.

"We're going to keep investing, because we believe there are great ideas in this room and in this country and in the world," Roberts said. "In the same way, it's unthinkable that a Google or a Yahoo or a Facebook or a Twitter would be happening if we hadn't made those investments (in broadband infrastructure) 15 years ago."

Battelle asked Roberts why he believes the U.S. lags behind in broadband technology advancements. Roberts replied, "I think that that's just not true."

(The audience laughed uncomfortably.)

"We have the same equipment (as other countries), the same wires, the same infrastructure, why is the adoption different is a different question. It's not the availability and I don't think it's the lack of speed," he continued. "You get to digital literacy, you get to what language it's in, do you have the right PC or a PC at all...I don't believe the infrastructure providers haven't done enough."

As for Net neutrality, an issue where Comcast has been a frequent villain after imposing bandwidth caps and interfering with peer-to-peer file-sharing software, Roberts was vague.

"We welcome that discussion, that scrutiny, and we're going to be an active participant," he said. "The few limited examples, including our own, that have gotten notoriety usually get dealt with in ten seconds, and changes get made, because this is new technology."

More recently, it's bubbled into the press that Comcast is in talks with General Electric to obtain a controlling stake in its NBC Universal property. Conveniently, GE chief Jeffrey Immelt was slated to speak later in the afternoon at Web 2.0 Summit.

"You and Jeff Immelt must have finished the NBC deal back in the green room," Battelle joked.

Roberts replied facetiously, "It's all done."

PALO ALTO, Calif.-- Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted in a talk here on Thursday evening that the company's response to a database outage that knocked out approximately 150,000 user accounts was "too slow."

"It's a very small percentage of our users, but it's a lot of people," Sandberg said of the affected users. "We want them to be able to (access Facebook) every day. We resolved it in about a week and a half. I think that was too slow."

Numerous Facebook users began complaining early this month that they could not access the social network, instead receiving a notice that their accounts were "down for maintenance." Many of them claimed that repeated requests for information from Facebook went unanswered, and clamored for better customer service and communication.

The whole affair was "a little frustrating, but it ended," Sandberg said, and chalked it up to the social network's extremely rapid growth. It now has more than 300 million active users around the world.

"We are, I promise, doing our best to scale," she continued, reiterating that all data (except for some recent updates, a statement from Facebook said last week), "and our growth means we're sometimes a little bit behind."

PALO ALTO, Calif.--"The stream of information coming at you can be overwhelming," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said when asked in an onstage interview what she thinks of social-networking fatigue. "I think people sometimes feel uncomfortable hitting 'ignore' (on friend requests), but if you don't want to connect to someone, that's why it's there."

Facebook, after all, is on top of the world. It doesn't make much difference to the health of that 300 million-member user base if your "social graph" is one degree smaller.

Sandberg, who joined Facebook a year and a half ago after a high-ranking sales job at Google, was interviewed Thursday at the Palo Alto Research Center auditorium by industry analyst Charlene Li. The event had been organized by Silicon Valley networking group The Churchill Club.

Since then, she has become the company's foremost evangelist for some of its most prominent marketing pitches: the power of connectivity, and how Facebook can give businesses a more authentic face. Sandberg had given the talk in New York to debut "BrandLift," the social network's partnership with statistics firm Nielsen to provide audience response to advertisements.

Li's questions for Sandberg weren't particular hard balls. Rather, the interview followed Sandberg's usual talking points for a corporate audience: how Facebook is an unparalleled and unprecedented hub for communication and interaction, and how in turn it has changed marketing and communication--and that there's no other place on the Web for advertisers to get that kind of interaction with consumers.

"There are other places on the Web where you can get reach and audience. Certainly Yahoo offers that...What we have is deep engagement," Sandberg said. "We are by far the place where people spend the most time on the Web. On average, a monthly user on Facebook spends 5.75 hours on the site. No. 2 is Yahoo, and they are at 3 hours and 23 minutes. That is a really big gap."

(Ouch, Yahoo.)

Facebook might be "a marketer's heaven," as Li put it, but Sandberg said it also takes user privacy seriously--another regular and understandable Facebook talking point, considering it's had the occasional privacy snafu in which user backlash has reached a fever pitch.

"Why is our usage exploding, as some of the other social properties are decreasing?" Sandberg asked rhetorically, not explicitly mentioning MySpace, which recent numbers showed has seen much of its traffic eaten up by Facebook's. "We think it's because we made it really safe." She talked about how one of the first things she learned from CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the high number of members who put their cell phone numbers on their profiles. "Facebook is that safe," Sandberg said. "And so we take user privacy as the most important thing we do."

It obviously hopes to continue to get bigger. The company is working on "a deep integration with mobile carriers" to reach audiences that may have access to mobile devices but not PCs, and recently launched its Facebook Lite site "if you are in a country with slow bandwidth and slow loading times...we really wanted to speed it up."

Are advertisers warming up as Facebook's membership skyrockets? "They certainly get it more than they did a year ago," Sandberg said--and indeed, Madison Avenue didn't warm up to Facebook immediately, amid reports that social-network advertising was difficult to harness and even more difficult to profit from. "We're growing our users, and that's helping us a lot, and our ad products have improved tremendously...in a tough economy, advertisers and marketers are looking for value."

At least according to the Valley tech press, the biggest threat to Facebook's dominance these days isn't coming from Microsoft or Google, but from upstart Twitter--which Facebook famously tried to purchase and was snubbed.

She reiterated that while both Facebook and Twitter are "part of the same movement...real-time information shared quickly," that there's room in the field for more than one player and that competition is positive.

She said, though, that she hasn't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon because of what she considers an important differentiation between the two services.

"I don't use it very frequently. I've put, like, two or three tweets up ever," Sandberg said. "I'm not trying to broadcast to the world, I'm trying to share with my friends. It's not what I want to do. Twitter's much more of a broadcast-to-everyone kind of thing."

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Among the tech industry's up-and-coming, ad-supported business models appear to be out of fashion. Or at least that appears to be the trend among the companies that just graduated from the annual Boulder, Colo.-based incubator program TechStars. Representatives from some of those start-ups convened for an "Investor Day" at a Microsoft-owned auditorium here on Wednesday morning.

Founded by venture capitalists David Cohen and Brad Feld three years ago, TechStars accepts a total of 20 participants in both Boulder and Boston for a summer of development, seminars with industry veterans, and a small amount of seed funding. Thirteen of those 20 companies were advanced enough to earn spots at Wednesday's Investor Day, in which they offered short presentations to more than 100 members of the venture capital community who are actively interested in making early-stage investments.

And not a single one was offering a strictly advertising-supported business model, something that would've been pretty unthinkable not so long ago.

"(These companies) are the future of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as it evolves," Feld said to the audience midway through the morning. "We think these are all very fundable companies. In fact, most of the companies that you're seeing today are either well down the path of closing financing, or have closed financing, but for many of them there's still room."

Unlike the TechCrunch50 start-up pitch event earlier this month, none of these companies were actually launching out of a total stealth mode. Some had already experienced a sort of PR blitz--travelogue site Everlater generated some buzz when people were using it to map their plans for airline JetBlue's "All You Can Jet" promotion, and unofficial Twitter app store OneForty experienced the usual tech-blog mayhem earlier this week when it launched in private alpha and set off a flurry among the early-adopter crowd as people scrambled for invites.

But like TechCrunch50's array of start-ups, most of the TechStars lineup had productivity on the brain. Gaming and entertainment companies were limited to TakeComics, which aims to bring an iTunes-inspired business model to the digitization of comic books, and AccelGolf, a decidedly hardcore set of mobile and Web-based applications for avid golfers.

Business-focused applications were far more commonplace. Retel Technologies has built security-camera software enhanced with data and analytics, NextBigSound tabulates bands and musicians' popularity on social-media and music sites to roll up into a product sold to industry professionals; SendGrid offers e-mail marketing services to businesses at a variety of price points; and HaveMyShift, built by a former Starbucks barista, offers an exchange for hourly employees at major chain stores to swap and pick up shifts.

The companies were a mixed bag, and so were the entrepreneurs behind them: many fell into the young-entrepreneur stereotype of puppy-faced young men who could use a haircut along with that seed funding, but others strayed from the norm. OneForty's Laura Fitton is already a respected Twitter consultant; Raj Aggarwal, CEO of mobile data start-up Localytics, is an Apple veteran who had helped construct the original business model for the iPhone; and the founders of mobile contact management company Sensobi professed to earlier entrepreneurial experience in the chocolate industry.

Of the entire lineup, Everlater--founded by two childhood friends who had quit their Wall Street jobs to found the company--offered the closest thing to the typical ad-supported consumer model that was so ubiquitous in Web 2.0's heyday a few years ago, and even still, the founders plan to sell customized scrapbook and postcard products as well as offer branded packages to travel companies hoping to get their name out there.

A few other TechStars presenters said they hoped to use a free, ad-supported model as an entry point for the subscription services where they plan to make more significant money: video-based language learning system LangoLab, for example, hopes to strike deals with online video hubs like Hulu and then charge for access to lessons based around that "premium" content, and open-source forum software Vanilla charges for the hosted version of its product.

Granted, these business models still have their pratfalls: namely, the fact that they actually have to find individuals or companies who are willing to pay, something that often requires the formation of a solid marketing or sales department before profits can start to roll in. That was why many of them said they were looking to close early-stage funding rounds soon.

But those solicitations for funding were not lofty. Almost all of the TechStars presentations provided a target amount that they were seeking for their angel or Series A rounds (a few had closed rounds already), and the vast majority were south of $1 million--far south, in some cases.

SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.

But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.

The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of the moment: real-time social media. As if Facebook and Twitter couldn't be dominating enough headlines here, there were six start-ups filling up the "stream" category: Threadsy, Lissn, Radiusly, Stribe, Clixtr, and The Whuffie Bank. And the panel of judges was joined by Twitter-savvy rapper Chamillionaire as a surprise guest.

Guess what? The judges, some of whom have been known to drink Silicon Valley hype Kool-Aid as though it were the world's finest wine, didn't think we needed most of these companies.

Oh, boy.

Threadsy's CEO Rob Goldman demos the site.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Threadsy, whose founders called it "the world's first integrated commnications client," was the best received of the bunch by far. It's a messaging client that aggregates e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, instant messages, and also "unbound" communications like general tweets and status messages that aren't necessarily geared to you. "We built Threadsy to pull you back together," CEO Rob Goldman told the audience, citing the rapidly growing percentage of Americans who are using more than one messaging client ona regular basis.

It's got a slick interface, can also aggregate automated profiles for your contacts' social-network feeds, and can track Twitter queries in an almost dizzying visual format.

"I think Robert Scoble's head was about to explode," conference organizer Jason Calacanis commented afterward, referring to the Valley mainstay's near-pathological obsession with social feed aggregation.

Scoble's response was remarkably pragmatic.

"I'm just wondering if it has the FriendFeed problem," he said, "which means there's not enough people in the world that care about aggregating all their friends' social networks," but added that he wanted to try it out as soon as possible. A few of the other judges raised questions about how Threadsy will make money, considering inboxes have never been a huge trove for ad dollars. Goldman's answer was a little bit convoluted, which this reporter took to mean that Threadsy hasn't quite figured it out yet.

Up next was Lissn, which appeared to be a combination of a news aggregator, a chat room, and a question-and-answer service. "Lissn starts with a conversation," founder Myke Armstrong said, and then demonstrated the app by posting the question "What would happen if the moon disappeared?" and watched comments and answers roll in. What wasn't really clear was exactly why anyone would use it, what with Twitter, Facebook statuses, and various "conversation" trackers out there already.

"Why would I leave Twitter to join this?" Scoble asked. Harsh words coming from the guy who loves to rave about the next shiny thing that streams words across your laptop screen.

Lissn lets people begin conversations about whatever they want.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Lissn was followed by Radiusly, which aims to solve scaling and communication problems for companies and brands that want to use microblogging and other social-media tools--many of which aren't terribly customizable. A company can build a Radiusly profile to create a directory of official social-network profiles for its employees, manage them internally, and share media like product images and videos for marketing and customer service purposes.

"I think you guys aimed at the right target but your dart hit the wall and not the target," Scoble said. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chimed in, "In a rare position I agree with much of what Robert (Scoble) was saying." Ouch.

Next in the lineup was Stribe, which is in the same vein as Meebo's chat toolbar and Google Friend Connect--in other words, something that a smattering of established companies are already trying--adding social-networking features to any site by adding a chunk of code. Stribe can provide metrics pertaining to traffic and engagement, too.

Stribe's social network on a page (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

This was another well-designed one, but it was met with more skepticism. "I think one of the hardest things about these networks is actually getting the community to sign up," Facebook exec Mike Schroepfer said on the panel of judges. Dick Costolo gently reminded the Stribe team, "You can do too many things and then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they should use your product for...when you try to do a lot of things at once, it confuses people as to how they should use it and then they just don't use it."

The fifth company in the lineup received a somewhat better reaction. Called Clixtr, it's an iPhone app (and eventually expanding to more handsets) that combines photo-sharing with location awareness, turning the phone into what CEO Fergus Hurley called "the ultimate social camera." Clixtr's hook is event photos: The iPhone app lets you browse pictures from geo-tagged events, send photos instantly to other Clixtr users' phones, and find events near you.

"I think that was awesome," Schroepfer said, but expressed some confusion over exactly how geotagging could sync up to an event. Scoble complimented its sign-up process, but said "I'm not sure it causes enough gameplay, or enough something-else that gets me into this." He wasn't the only one to point out that getting people to use the app would be a challenge. "I would up the level of incentive for participation," Reid Hoffman said, and added that Facebook could easily build location-awareness into the photo feature of its mobile apps.

The last company was what Calacanis called "one of our wild-cards," The Whuffie Bank. Named after the deplorable term preferred by marketing-buzzword-loving social media consultants everywhere (basically, it's slang for social capital, a term coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow), The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization for building a virtual currency around online reputation and influence. You can then use that currency to pay others with "whuffie," like tossing a bribe someone's way to ask them to retweet something you've posted on Twitter.

Note to the Whuffie Bankers: At the very least, please choose a different name for your organization. "Whuffie" sounds like something that would happen in porn movies. And the judges seemed to think that however cool of an idea it might be, it might be best if the currency stays in science fiction.

"The problem with these kinds of currencies is you generally need some kind of banking system to regulate them," Reid Hoffman said. "A lot of cool things...I think conceptually it's going to be extraordinary difficult."

"I want to hear in one line, what do I get?" celebrity judge Chamillionaire asked. "It seem like you've got to do a lot of work for them to raise your reputation...It seems like you can fake it."

And with that, it was happy hour. Or so everyone hoped.